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Non-Western Philosophy
Indigenous Australian Philosophy
Ross Naidoo looks at Indigenous thinking through a philosophical lens.
The Indigenous or Aboriginal peoples of Australia speak several hundred distinct languages, distributed across a vast continent. Although their unique worldviews developed over long ages and great distances, the same folktales, concepts and traditional beliefs can often be found in many different language groups. Academic study of these matters has usually been the preserve of anthropologists, but can philosophy perhaps raise our understanding of Indigenous belief systems? To explore this question, I will be seeking to categorize their culturally specific wisdom under Western, and to a lesser degree non-Western, philosophical frameworks. At the end of the article I will suggest a return to the exploration of the sacred, as this is the foundational basis of Indigenous philosophy.
A scar tree
Aboriginal scar tree © Kazadams 2012 Creative Commons 3
In an introductory essay on Australian Indigenous wisdom, I’m clearly not trying to capture the minutia and vastness of more than 50,000 years of the evolution of Indigenous wisdom.
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